The last time Gold Panda was up for a prize, he won a McDonald's voucher for coming second in a paperboy of the year contest. Now the electronic music producer has become the winner of the 2010 Guardian first album award, for Lucky Shiner, recorded in his aunt and uncle's Essex living room.

Something similarly small-scale and intimate triumphed in the Guardian first film award. Director Clio Barnard won for The Arbor, her documentary about playwright Andrea Dunbar, who lived on and wrote about the Buttershaw council estate in Bradford.

"The prosaic reason that Gold Panda won is because it was the album the judges found themselves listening to most," said Alexis Petridis, the Guardian's chief pop writer, who chaired the music award's judging panel, on which Guardian critics were joined by Edwyn Collins. "It sounds very warm and human and inviting – it's someone using synthesisers and samples to give you a sense of themselves, rather than rock a dancefloor."

The Arbor, described as "utterly unique and devastating" by actor Saffron Burrows, who was among the judges, uses actors to lip-synch to recordings of Dunbar's family. Dunbar died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990.

The lip-synching has led to questions about whether The Arbor really is a documentary. "I don't mind what they call it," Barnard said. "It's meant to provoke. Part of the rationale was to show that truth is unstable, that true documentary will always fail. My own view is, because of the archive material and the audio recordings, it's more of a documentary than a fiction film. But the blurring between the two is deliberate."